Published
Tue, Feb 8, 2011, 15:00
- In this week's column we discuss why letting in a little "random" might be the answer your productions are looking for.
Sounding Off is a regular series in which Jono Buchanan offers his thoughts, advice and analysis on the world of music technology.
One of the most powerful things about seeing musicians perform live is the sheer, exhilarating sense of unpredictability. Whether you choose to go and see your favourite band, orchestra, live electronic act or any other ensemble group you care to mention, no two performances will ever be quite alike and, as a result, the spirit of any song, symphony or arrangement continually evolves. As junior musicians begin their development, in a way, they crave that which comes so easily to music made with electronics; offer a young cellist, guitarist or trumpet player the guarantee that each time they play a note it'll be in tune and in time and they'd bite your hand off to be able to depend on such a result.
However, that striving to "get better," to improve the rudiments of playing an instrument and developing a sensitivity towards musical performance, is essential if musicians are to develop a relationship with the music they play and sadly, it's one which is possible to completely bypass in the studio if you're not careful. Think about this: in Logic Pro (to name but one DAW), I can drag and drop a series of pre-made audio clips to produce a brand new piece and I can then load preset effects settings in ready-made channel strips to enhance them without having to really know what each effect does. If I'm feeling brave, I could even draw a MIDI sequence in, one note at a time, guaranteeing its fully quantized, bang-in-tune involvement in my piece.
Clearly, a much more creative process is also possible and the fact that plenty of us producer-types adore our professional lives in studios despite having trained classically or become accomplished instrumentalists, suggests that there must be alternative ways of working. That said, that sheer unpredictability one gets from being creative with live musicians, where someone will suddenly pop up with a great idea, or a "wrong" note suddenly seems to work better than a "right" one; these things are hard to manufacture in the studio, particularly if you work alone.
The fact is, DAWs are great at unintentionally squeezing natural musical life out of the tracks we make in just a few well-meaning button clicks. Even a natural performance can be undone with the two commands "quantise" and "fix dynamics" and actually, as arrangements build and become more complex, the need to fix timings and relative volumes seems to become more crucial as parts vie for space in a mix. So, how to prevent any sense of musicianship disappearing from the electronic music we make with computers? Well, quite aside from trying not to reach for quantise automatically, it's the idea of introducing randomness and the concept that unpredictable things might happen which nearly always leads to inspiration.
The problem with synths, for instance, is that we either reach for presets and tweak from there (hardly the same as creating sounds with real instruments) or we're sufficiently well-versed in the concepts of synthesis that we're capable of building a sound we can already hear in our heads. In both scenarios, randomness is conspicuously absent. The idea that the technology we use might offer up unusual sounds of its own is more interesting, in that this approach gets us working with sounds beyond our control.
If this appeals, you'd be surprised how easy it is to let a little random in. I once heard a story about a successful production team who, having finished their radio edits, physically connected channel 1 of their patchbay into channel 2, so that the sound from the first channel would pass through the EQ, compression, effects and level settings of the adjacent channel on their mixing desk, before plugging 2 into 3, 3 into 4 and so on. Nine times out of ten the results would be uninteresting but every once in a while, a weird and wonderful noise would offer itself up and from there a remix or new track might begin.
As a starting point, DAWs offer us the same opportunity; once a mix is finished, randomly copy or move channel strips from one channel to the next and see what happens. Beyond that, some synths like Absynth 5 and Logic's ES2 offer randomising controls within their GUIs, allowing you to choose an amount of randomness before letting the plug-in do the rest. Think too about randomizing effects like Supatrigga and Glitch, which rearrange sounds in ways you can't entirely predict and, crucially, in subtly different ways each time you press Play.
Thinking a little further outside the box, why not randomize things further with your choice of modulation options when programming synth sounds. We all know, for instance, that velocity is usually used to control the volume of a sound but if your synth allows free assignment of this parameter as a control source, patch it into pitch, pan, distortion, effects sends... the options are endless and the results can often produce something magical.
If you're flush with studio tools, there's even an argument that maintaining different levels of familiarity with your plug-in suites is beneficial. For instance, if you need to program a sound and be able to accurately predict the result before you start, develop an intimate knowledge with a synth of choice to develop an all-knowing relationship. However, if you want to encourage a "chance" result, perhaps turn to another tool you know less well and have a bit of a poke around to see if it can offer up something special and unusual. If that sounds like I'm advocating actually not learning how to use all of your instruments properly then you've read it right. Letting fate decide how your production will progress is also fun, and tools like Brian Eno's Oblique Stategies, where a set of cards offer random instructions to encourage a change in direction in your working practice, can often yield something unexpected.
There are 1001 other ways in which promoting some unpredictability can be brought to bear on your productions and, of course, the huge upside of working within a computer-based environment is that, having welcomed randomness into your work to help you get inspired, things can always be brought back under control and tamed if things are getting out of hand. There's nothing like an audio bounce to capture a plug-in going crazy before you chop it, tweak it and choose the best bits. The journey, however, is a good deal more interesting if the destination remains a little unknown.
Jono Buchanan is a producer, composer, music technology lecturer and journalist based in London. Beyond his contributions to RA, he writes regularly for Future Music magazine and teaches Electronic Music at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. His freelance production career involves work with a broad selection of artists, while he also composes regularly for television.